Intent driven controller for provisioning software applications on networked equipment

1. A method for provisioning a communication network, comprising: selecting, by a network infrastructure controller connected to the communication network, a software application from among a plurality of software applications, wherein: the selected software application is comprised of at least a first and a second microservice, each of which have associated operational requirement information maintained in a non-volatile computer readable medium comprising the communication network; and the communication network is comprised of a plurality of networked equipment each of which has one or more of processing elements, forwarding elements and communication channel element capabilities that are maintained in a computer readable medium comprising the communication network; comparing, by the network infrastructure controller, the operational requirement information associated with the first and the second microservice to capability information associated any one of the plurality of networked equipment to identify a first processing element capable of supporting the first microservice and to identify a second processing element capable of supporting the second microservice, and placing each microservice on the networked equipment identified as being able to support it; identifying a plurality of communication network topologies, each of the topologies is comprised of the first and second processing elements and at least one forwarding path between the processing elements that satisfies the communication requirements of both microservices, and maintaining each of the identified communication network topologies as a set of communication network topologies; and selecting one of the communication network topologies from the set of topologies and provisioning the processing, forwarding and communication channel elements comprising the selected topology to support the operation of both microservices.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein each of the forwarding paths is comprised of one or more networked forwarding elements and communication channel elements.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the first and the second microservices are designed to communicate with each other during a time that the software application is operating.

4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the operational requirement information associated with each microservice is maintained, for use by the network infrastructure controller, as an operational requirement model.

5. The method of claim 4 , wherein each operational requirement model comprises a plurality of uniquely identified stages, and each stage is comprised of either a set of compute, memory and storage requirements, or a set of communication requirements associated with a microservice.

6. The method of claim 5 , wherein first and second ones of the plurality of the stages are comprised of compute, memory and storage operational requirements, and the first and second ones of the stages are joined to each other by a third stage comprising communication requirements that together form the operational requirement model for the application that the selected network topology supports.

7. The method of claim 5 , wherein each of the stages are displayed visually by a graphical user interface as two or three-dimensional geometric images.

8. The method of claim 7 , wherein the stage comprising compute, memory and storage requirements is displayed visually as a cube, and the stage comprising communication requirements is displayed visually as a sphere.

9. The method of claim 8 , wherein the sphere can be joined to two or more cubes.

10. The method of claim 1 , wherein each of the plurality of the software applications available to the network infrastructure controller for selection have an indication of their selection priority.

11. A system for provisioning a communication network, comprising: the communication network comprising a plurality of networked equipment each of which has any one or more of processing, memory, storage and communication channel element capability information associated with it that is maintained in a non-volatile, computer readable medium; a store having a plurality of computer applications and associated operational requirement information maintained in a non-volatile, computer readable medium; and a network infrastructure controller connected to the communication network that operates to: select any one of the plurality of the software applications; compare the operational requirement information associated with a first and a second microservice comprising the selected software application to capability information associated any one of the plurality of networked equipment to identify a first processing element capable of supporting the first microservice and to identify a second processing element capable of supporting the second microservice; place each microservice on the networked equipment identified as being able to support it; identify a plurality of communication network topologies, each of the topologies comprising the first and second processing elements and at least two forwarding paths between them that satisfy the communication requirements of both microservices, and maintaining each identified communication network topology as a set of communication network topologies; and selecting one of the communication network topologies from the set of topologies and provisioning the processing, forwarding and communication channel elements comprising the selected topology to support the operation of both microservices.